I had been talking with an old seaman about the races between an English and an American yacht. My companion was a man who had spent the greater part of his life at sea, and was a sailor in the sense that includes not only smartness, alertness, and skill in those duties expected of seamen, but thorough knowledge of all that concerns ships, both in the fabrics of their hulls, and in their masts, yards, rigging, and canvas. He said to me that he was not sorry the Yankee had beaten the Englishman, because it might cause yachtsmen to see that beam must still be regarded as a condition of speed, and that the notion that swiftness was to be obtained by a shape that answered to Euclid’s definition of a line had been carried considerably too far. One thing leading to another, he spoke of schooner yachts, and said that, so far as racing was concerned, he fancied that the schooner rig was gradually sliding out of date.

“And yet,” said he, “I’m certain that if the prejudices of yachting skippers and yachting crews could be overcome, and owners induced to see the thing in its right light, the schooner yacht could be rendered a faster craft than the most splashing and frothing of the yawls or cutters which now seem capable of sailing round them. It was only the other day I was looking at a yacht race. There was a middling breeze blowing. I turned the glass upon a schooner that was in the race; she was ratching through it with spars almost erect, whilst the yawls lay down till their rail looked to be under. Why was that? Would not you say because the schooner hadn’t canvas enough? She was showing all she had; but she wanted more, and if more had been given her she would have been leading instead of hanging in the wake of the toys that were swirling ahead of her. What other canvas would I give her? Why, of course, I’d give her a fore-yard and a top-sail and a topgallant yard. Consider what a square sail would have done for that schooner. I’ve been sailing in a vessel of that rig when we’ve taken the square top-sail off her, and the moment that bit of canvas was clewed up you might have felt the way deadened in her as if she’d lost her life—as if all impulse was gone. The yachting skippers have got a prejudice against square canvas. It comes, in my opinion, in a good many cases, from the feeling that if they were shipmates with a top-sail-yard they wouldn’t quite know what to do with it. I’ve spoken to a good many of them upon the subject, and asked how it is that they don’t recommend their gents to rig their vessels with square yards forward; but their regular answer is, ‘Pooh! we don’t want no square sails. Who’s going to be bothered with bracing yards about and mucking up aloft after shipshape bunts when gaffs and booms ’ll blow us along as fast as we need to go?’ That’s what it comes to. ‘Who’s going to be bothered?’ A skipper said to me: ‘Take a vessel in stays. You’ve got your top-sail aback, and instead of shooting ahead as a fore-and-after will, she stops dead while she slowly comes round.’ That shows his ignorance. I’ve been ratching down the Mersey in a clipper schooner, and such way did she get from her square canvas, and such little notice did she take of her top-sail coming aback, that I’ve seen the skipper head her for the shore with a slow putting down of his helm to let her edge along, and I’ve watched her run for a good spell parallel with the shore before she came round on the other tack. The increased way the square canvas gives a schooner counterbalances whatever loss of way an aback top-sail is supposed to cause her. My own opinion of the advantage of that canvas is such that I’d undertake to fit a schooner yacht with a square rig forward on these terms: That I was allowed to sail her first; that if she beat I was to receive double pay for my services, and if she lost what I’d done should be at my own expense, and I’d restore her to her old rig free. Only fancy in ratching the pulling power you’d be giving to a schooner. Your foreyard is suspended by a truss, and if you choose you could sweat it fore and aft if you liked. There’s nothing in square canvas to prevent a schooner from lying up as close as if she was fore-and-aft rigged. Naturally schooners ’ll go to leeward and be lost sight of as racers if the canvas they compete under is out of all proportion with the canvas that yawls and cutters spread. This is my notion, anyway, and such is my faith in my own opinion that I’m willing to stand or fall by it on the terms I’ve given you, if so be any owner of a schooner yacht is agreeable to give me the chance.”

I have no comment to offer on this sailor’s observations. My knowledge of racing yachts, their qualities and requirements, does not carry me nearly far enough to form any approach to a judgment upon the use that might be made amongst competing schooners of square sails and square topsails. I may say, in the language of the old sea-song, “I served my time in the Blackwall Line.” I went to sea at the age of thirteen and a half in Duncan Dunbar’s service, and kept to the life until I was nearly two and twenty. Few sailors combine a knowledge of fore-and-aft with square-rig seamanship. There is as great a difference between them as there is between steam and sail. For my own part, I must confess to knowing very little about yachts and yachting. The point that struck me most in this man’s conversation was the vast amount of experience that must obviously be embodied in the innumerable rigs which are found afloat in all parts of the world. A single sail will make all the difference between two vessels; nay, even the shape of a sail will as completely distinguish one craft from another as the uniform of a soldier distinguishes him from a policeman. Think of the years of weather, of violent seas, of smooth waters lightly fanned, of strong head breezes, and soft airs blowing over the stern, which have entered into the creation of those hundred different types of canvas—square, oblong, pyramidal, angular, jib-headed, long-headed, and the rest of it, which pass and repass our shores. Here is an old sailor declaring that schooner yachts ought to be square-rigged forward, and he says that nearly all the yacht captains he has talked to upon this subject are opposed to his ideas. One can perceive in this the difficulty there must have been in the beginning to settle the question of canvas, a question only to be dealt with by experience, but an experience so varied and immense that it is impossible for any man, capable of rightly compassing the character of it, not to find something absolutely impressive in its way in every cloth that gleams upon the sea.

I remember once being in the smoking-room of a large hotel, and hearing two men, in the presence of several companions of theirs, arguing about what a billyboy was. One man said it was a kind of barge, the other maintained that it was a sloop-rigged vessel similar to the old hoy. Much nonsense was talked, yet the people sitting about them listened with attention, emptied their glasses, and looked as though they thought that no matter which of the disputants was wrong—and one must be wrong—both of them evidently knew a very great deal about rigs. At last an elderly man, with a velvet collar to his black cloth coat, coming out of his chair in a corner, said, “I beg pardon for intruding, but I happen to know something about billyboys; in fact, I own a couple. What sort of a billyboy do you gentlemen mean? Is it a sloop-billyboy, or a schooner-billyboy, or a ketch-billyboy?” The company looked hard at him, for it was plain a general misgiving as to his seriousness seized them when he spoke of a ketch-billyboy. “The sort of billyboy we are arguing about,” was the answer, “is just simply—a billyboy.” “Well,” said the other, “as I told you gents, I own two. One’s ketch-rigged, and t’other’s cutter-rigged. The billyboy,” he added, “is a round starned vessel with standing bowsprit and jib-stay, and mostly she’s all hatchways.” That was his definition, and it was accepted, the man who argued that the billyboy was rigged like a sloop looking particularly pleased.

Now one would wish to know whether a billyboy, no matter how many masts she carried, would still be called a billyboy if she had a running instead of a standing bowsprit? This is one of those delicate points over which I will venture to say many a hoarse argument has been roared out amidst clouds of tobacco smoke and the fumes of old Jamaica.

“There,” said I one day, pointing to a very smart schooner that was passing, “goes a pretty little vessel.”

“Aye,” answered the ’longshoreman whom I had addressed, “a butterman.”

“Freighted with butter, eh?” said I, not doubting that that was what he meant.

“Butter!” he ejaculated, “No. What I mean is she’s butter-rigged.”

“And pray what is butter-rigged?” said I, for I protest I had never heard the expression before.

“Why,” he said, “a butter-rigged schooner’s a vessel that sets her t’gall’nt sail flying. The yard comes down on the taw’sa’l yard, and the sails is furled together.”

And this is a butter-rigged schooner! A well-defined distinction as rigs go, and all because the topgallant yard has no lifts! A long while after I asked an old sailor if he knew how it was that the term “butter-rigged” came to be applied to vessels furnished with this kind of topgallant yard, and he answered that he believed the name was given in consequence of numbers of this kind of craft trading to Holland for butter.

Niceties in nomenclature may be found as low down even as the humble barge. For instance, there is the well-known sprit-sail barge; a vessel with a mainsail that sets on a sprit—that is, a long pole, if I may so describe it, that stretches the outer head of the sail, from the foot of the mast. The mainsail of a sprit-sail barge is brailed up when taken in, and one must be careful that she has brails in talking to sailors about her, otherwise one’s ignorance will be greatly laughed at, sometimes secretly, and quite as often openly. For the landsman must know that there is another species of barge called a boomsail barge, which is a vessel with a gaff and a boom; so here you have throat and peak halliards, and brails are not required. Again, there is the ketch-barge, a long vessel constructed on modern lines, and rigged with a standing bowsprit and jibboom, a gaff mainsail and a gaff mizzen. Let these fine distinctions be remembered in speaking of the barge to the bargee, for here already we see very nearly as many types of barges as there are types of yachts.

Take the ketch. To the untutored eye she resembles a barge, yet she is no more a barge than a barque is a ship. And why? Because, says the nautical man, a ketch is a vessel with a top-sail and small mizzen; and that settles it. Nor can the list of barges be held as complete without reference to the dumb barge, that is, a barge without rigging or masts. Few ship-captains who have occasion to navigate the Thames but execrate the name of this kind of barge as one of the fruitfullest sources of their marine troubles and perplexities. This wretched, naked, darksome, and grimy object is incessantly floating under ships’ bows, bringing-up in wrong places, getting cut down round corners, generally with the destruction of one man, the other man nearly always holding on to something, and in many other ways constantly producing much small vexatious county-court litigation. The dumb barge is very happily named, and the term smells strongly of the bridge.

Some of the terms given to certain descriptions of rig mark a degree of forecastle scorn and illustrate the power of marine irony. As an example take the “jackass barque.” Only the eye of a mariner would distinguish any difference between a vessel so termed and the fully rigged barque. And what is the distinction? A jackass barque has fore and main topmasts and topgallant masts in one. This is why, I suppose, sailors call her jackass. Perhaps the term mule would have been more correct; and yet the polacre, that outdoes the jackass barque, in respect of spars, is suffered to pass without a derisive appellation. Here you have a vessel with masts all in one to as high as the topmast crosstrees, after which you come to separate topgallant masts, fidded.^[73] Commonly, in consequence of there being no tops, the sailors climb aloft by means of a “Jacob’s ladder” that starts from the eyes of the lower rigging and ascends to the height of the crosstrees. Thus we find distinctions owing to masts simply, and not to the number of masts, but the manner in which they are fashioned. So a sailor speaks of skysail poles, of short royal mast heads, of stump or short topgallant masts; the vocabulary is apparently endless.

And yet one word means only one thing, and every one is totally different from another. As a single example, when you speak of skysail poles you are talking of a length of mast continued above the royal mast, upon which a skysail yard may be crossed. When you speak of stump topgallant masts you refer to a mast that is neither royal mast nor skysail mast, and upon which only a topgallant-sail can be set, thus losing the two sails which the existence of the skysail pole admits of.

It is noteworthy that the only vessel to which a mast more or less makes no difference is a ship—that is, a ship in the sailor’s meaning of the word, and not according to Act of Parliament. For here let me say that the law defines a ship to be any fabric that is not propelled by oars, a piece of absurdity forced upon general acceptance by its conveniency. The proper definition of a ship is a vessel with three masts, each mast being square-rigged. She would be a ship, even if she did not carry anything above her crosstrees, for she is made so by her crossjack and mizzen top-sail yard and mizzen top;^[74] yet, if you add a fourth mast to a ship she is still a ship, even if it be what is termed a spanker mast—that is, a mast rigged like the mizzen-mast of a barque. Four-masted ships are now common. They seem comparatively recent; but in reality they are as old at least as that noble American clipper, the Great Republic, that was afloat some twenty or thirty years ago. These fourth masts in ships are supposed to have been introduced on account of the length of the vessels; but I have seen ships as small as any three-masted craft rigged with four masts. They say that these four-masted concerns are handy in stays, that, proportionally, they need fewer hands than three-masted ships, and captains have told me that they have watched them thrashing to windward in a strong breeze with the power of an ocean passenger-steamer. I should think this very likely, if it were not that every vessel of this type which I have watched sailing or towing away, outward bound, has been so deep as to look amidships as if there was nothing but the thickness of her covering-board between her and the water.

Many changes have been made in the rig of ships which have not altered their character. Double topgallant yards leave a ship a ship, though an alteration of this sort probably in another kind of vessel would cause sailors to invent a new name for her. Take, for example, that most familiar craft, the brig. If the trysail of this vessel sets directly upon her mainmast, then she is a brig; but if you affix a little mast abaft her mainmast, and call it a trysail mast, and then set your trysail upon this mast, the brig, by this very trifling change, becomes what is called a “snow.” A landsman might be defied to detect any difference between a snow and a brig, and even when the distinction was pointed out to him he would scarcely understand what it consisted of. Nevertheless, the addition or want of a trysail mast creates two kinds of vessels rigged absolutely alike in all other respects, and so far from the terms being interchangeable, as might be imagined of names applied to what looks to be the same thing, the word “snow” is used in advertisements of sales by auction in order that it may be known the vessel offered is not a brig; and thus you may see in the shipping papers advertisements announcing that “On Thursday the snow Aunt Sally will be sold, etc.,” and, perhaps under it, “On Tuesday next, the brig Ann Maria.”

These are queer niceties, and of very little use that I can see; but sailors insist upon them, and Jack must be allowed to have his way.

Take, again, the yawl and the dandy. Both vessels are cutter-rigged forward, with a mizzen-mast aft, upon which they set a small sail. To the inexperienced eye they are exactly alike. What, then, is the difference? It lies in the little sail that is set upon the mizzen-mast. A yawl has a lug-mizzen, the foot of which sets on a spar that projects over the stern. The dandy’s mizzen has a gaff and boom, though the mizzens of some dandies, I believe, are what is termed jib-headed. The distinction is minute, and yet the difference when looked into is found to be decided enough. The yawl is chiefly the pleasure craft, the dandy the fishing vessel.

Amongst fishing craft the varieties of rigs are few. They consist of the dandy, the lugger, and the smack. The smack is a vessel that is rigged like a cutter, and it is not necessary that a vessel should be a fishing boat in order to be called a smack.

To people who care about the sea there is much that is interesting in rigs. The variations are curious as illustrating experiments, and the resolution to adopt certain forms useful in particular trades. There is the barque, a three-masted vessel square-rigged on her fore and main masts, and with fore-and-aft sails on her mizzen-mast; she is varied by the barquentine, a vessel rigged like a brig, or indeed like a barque or ship on her foremast, but with fore-and-aft sails only on her main and mizzen-masts.^[75] Then out of the brig you get the snow, and out of the snow the hermaphrodite brig, which is a vessel with a brig’s foremast and a schooner’s mainmast, and out of the hermaphrodite brig comes the brigantine, that, unlike the hermaphrodite, carries a square top-sail at the main, and, unlike the brig, has no maintop. In the same way there are different types of schooners, such as the three-masted schooner, the fore-and-aft schooner, the top-sail schooner, and the two-top-sail schooner. Differences of cut, numbers of masts, spread of sail, give distinctions to the smallest and humblest class of boats. Thus a tosher is not a long-shore driver, though both little vessels are employed in catching what they can close into the land.

One needs a good memory to bear even a few distinctions in mind. I remember once standing on the banks of the Tyne and hearing a man, pointing to a vessel like a lighter, call her a wherry. To my South-country notions, of course, a wherry was a small open boat in which people are rowed by a waterman, or which they hire for excursions. Close alongside this gigantic Tyne wherry, which, by the way, if my memory serves me rightly, was half full of coal, lay a similar-looking craft that the same man spoke of as a keel. I asked him why one should be called a keel and the other a wherry, when they were both very much alike, and I am under the impression, though I cannot be sure at this distance of time, that he said the difference lay in one being carvel built, that is, with the outer planks coming together and forming a perfectly smooth side, and the other being clincher-built, a term applied to planks when they overlay one another. Be this as it may, it is at least certain that a wherry in the north is different from a wherry in the south, and really when one comes to consider the infinite variety of rigs and builds, and the almost imperceptible subtleties amongst them which make the same name utterly inapplicable to what looks exactly like the same thing, nautical gentlemen, individuals who are not exactly sailors, but who nevertheless know a very great deal indeed about the sea, insomuch that they are prepared to instruct, at a moment’s notice, the most ancient mariner they can come across in his business—such people ought to be a little more compassionate than they are usually found in dealing with those errors or oversights in marine technicality which landsmen are repeatedly guilty of, and which writers and others who ought to know better are occasionally chargeable with.